Introduction: Digital Culture and Analog Spaces

MediaComons’ April survey asks how digital culture affects analog spaces and and interactions. We live in an age where real and digital spaces are constantly remediated. As Katie Day Good mentions in the first post for this survey, many of the practices and uses of the bulletin board are remediated into online spaces like Facebook. In the Media Park at ODU, where I work, we have Facebook magnets on our fridge that we use to interact with a different, analog, professional and social community focused on digital media and learning. The lines between digital and analog spaces are in many ways fluid, but at the same time, digital culture has a lasting influence on real spaces. We see this in contemporary activist groups and our survey on the digital divide asked similar questions about how physical space influences digital participation.

This month’s survey reflects on a diverse set of musings on how the digital and the material intersect to create meaning. Responses include metaquestions on how we discuss mediated spaces as well as research into digital culture and social action, porn studies, social media, gaming, and cosplay. Our hope is that this survey will introduce many to the research going on in this particular field of digital scholarship but also open up discussion on how changing media spaces change the ways in which we answer this question.